Today’s Hempsonian Feature: “Telephone” By Caryl Pagel

Thiebaud and Yellow Phone

A new poem by Caryl Pagel in         the latest issue                                          of the Iowa Review.  Click her image to answer the phone…

pagel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hempsonian Diptych: Wayne Thiebaud, “24th Street Intersection Study” (1978) / yellow phone (anonymous)

Poems and Ponderings

My High School Music Director Turns 80

 

Bob Burton Turns Eighty
BOB BURTON TURNS EIGHTY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Acrostic Poem for my High School Choir Director

Believe it or not our maestro has reached a perfect
Octave. Each decade describes a clean sweep of his
Baton. And today, as always, we follow his lead, that subtle lift of his
Brow as he elevates us to mellifluous
Unity. That thrilling inhale! That expectation! Then that plunge into
Rhythm and melody. A crescendo opens and closes. Opens again.
Tempo moves our limbs and we become the andante and allegro.
Oh! S’Wonderful, S’Marvelous!
Nothing can stop us because nothing stops him from
Transporting all who sing, and those who hear, to a bandwidth
Up beyond the plane on which we eat our toast or brush our teeth.
Remember to start above the note and then come down to
Nail it, he tells us, the gypsy in our souls more than ready to
Sing our winged hearts out for this man. He composes more than tunes.
Even though he’s fancy free and loves to wander – bussing tourists
In the pouring rain, bobbing in a yellow raft, or basting
Ginger chicken with his Gourmet Club gang, his true self is
Harmonic Virtuoso, one who can woo both Handel and Cole Porter from
Teenagers and grownups alike. He has shaped our dominant chords for
Years and decades. We’re planning now for the Major Ninth!

Christine Hemp    June 30, 2013  Edmonds, Washington

 

Poems and Ponderings

Today’s Hempsonian Feature: Shaping Chaos

Shaping Chaos

Poems and Ponderings

Today’s Hempsonian Feature: Modern Love

NYTimes MODERN LOVE  A Choice Not as Easy as It Looked

NYTimes MODERN LOVE A Choice Not as Easy as It Looked

Arresting and lovely piece by my friend and colleague Lisa Schlesinger.

Poems and Ponderings

Today’s Hempsonian Feature: Two Paragraphs

“Practice” a lovely flash-nonfiction essay by novelist, playwright, and director Sands Hall.

Sands Hall

 

Poems and Ponderings

Midnight Sun: Thoughts on Unending Light

LOFOTEN ISLANDS
Last night Ole and I rented a little red fisherman’s hut –a “Rorbu”— for the night. Food and lodging is wildly expensive in Norway, but if you have your own bedding (we brought sheets and comforters from his uncle’s house) and bring a cooler of food, these little red cabins are perfect camping spots. Tired after a day of driving, we napped from 4 till about 6 p.m.  The sun slanted over these impossibly shaped islands and washed us in a kind of reverie.

After we got up, we snacked – lox and cod roe on bread – drank a Nordland pilsner, then went exploring. Instead of thinking “Oh, we’d better hurry to see things before it gets dark!” we expanded into the evening. As if there were no tomorrow.  Because there IS no tomorrow here:  In mid-June above the Arctic Circle the sun never sets. 

At first I couldn’t wrap my mind around this business of no night. (Do you shut the curtains?), and in the past when I’ve asked Ole about this aspect of his Norwegian childhood, he’d always get this dreamy look in his eye and say, “No, it isn’t uncomfortable at all. It’s wonderful, actually.  I remember sheep bells out my open window and the pleasant feeling that the light was with me even though I was a kid in bed.” I didn’t know what to do with this day that stretched on and on. I was restless and couldn’t really settle into “going to bed.”

But now, after about a week, my body is finding its rhythm. There seems to be more time, more space. “After dinner” no longer means reading a bit, downloading pictures to Facebook, and turning in. Dinner itself is sort of a sideline and “evening” now means that we leave our cabin at 9 and venture off into something new.

Last night we went to Henningsvær to explore the racks of drying cod against a spectacular sky, mountains jutting up from the sea.  We wandered through the little village – wind whistling through the hundreds of cod tails drying on the racks. We met a local cat who promptly peed on the bumper of our rented car. Though all the shops were closed, kids on skateboards laughed and scooted down the street. A couple sipped a glass of wine on the deck of their boat. We walked along a cove trail and heard voices coming from somewhere we couldn’t see. We craned our necks. The non-setting sun shimmered, translucent across the water –just barely touching the pokey tips of the faraway peaks.  Sure enough –nearly vertically above us on the face of the sheer rock— three climbers hugged the cliff, one being belayed from above. All this happening at midnight! 

I can’t help but think what it’s like up here in December.  I’ve been to Norway in the winter, but only in the South where the sun does rise. The winter has its own appeal – candles and cozy hearths and stars reflecting against the snow—but there is a dark mystery to this northern land  that even the summer midnight sun cannot shake. Maybe that’s why the Vikings  and the Sami (Laplander) cultures were rife with spirits, gods, fairies and trolls.  Even in June bloom, it’s not hard to picture a troll or two among the squiggly birch trees in the muskeg or Thor cracking his hammer over this archipelago that spills into the querulous North Sea.  

On our drive out here to the islands, Ole and I stopped at a strange little Sami Museum – tucked up in the hills. We had to hike up a trail to find the old homestead where a Laplander had lived in the 1800’s. The 20-something Sami who escorted us around the place told me about the ghosts he’d heard in the house and how the whole deserted farm– a sweeping meadow and a view of mountains in the distance – was filled with Spirit. There was even a sign that said one must always respect the trolls and faeries who live under that rock. “Keep on their right side” the sign said, and in return they will care for the animals “and make sure all goes well on the farm.” 

And today at Borg where the Scandinavian archeologists have rebuilt the huge hall of the Viking Kings of 1000 years ago, we learned that the Vikings themselves had a tumultuous but intimate relationship with the gods.  Oden and others were responsible for both the darkness and the light. It was believed that the human race itself was spawned by a union between the gods and men.  And, according to the self-guided tour, the world of people was only held together by the circle of the serpent. And there was a catch to that, too: The serpent was eating its own tail. Chaos was always just around the corner. (Ain’t that the truth!) 

The Viking chieftains were said to have supernatural powers, too, and the natural world was as alive and vocal as any human, both benign and frightening. Living on the edge of the island – the vast Atlantic ocean just out the fjord –  they held the knowledge in June that a different kind of light would envelop their world soon enough:  candlelight and the moon reflecting off the snow.  Maybe next time we come here I’ll see the beauty of the dark time, too, the stars like sparks from Thor’s fire and the Northern Lights shimmering in place of the sun.

 

 

Poems and Ponderings

Scrolls: Vikings or Peace Brokers? by Christine Hemp

 

If I hold up a toothbrush next to a pencil, a fire hydrant to a tennis shoe – or a Viking ship to a musical instrument, I am forced to see each of those disparate things with a new eye. Yesterday at the Viking Museum in Oslo we marveled at the ships dating back to 850 A.D., their hulls swelling with elegant lines, their scrolled mastheads writhing like serpents.  Discovered near Oslo at the turn of the last century, the boats turned out to be burial sites. Like Egyptian pharaohs, Viking kings were interred with their riches, both practical and decorative –  gold, jewelry, sleds, horses, and even their slaves. Each king was buried in the vessel which had ferried him far into unknown waters.

While we admired the lean, fair ships and the contents of the burial caches, my teenage nephew Håkon told me about the Vikings’ vision of the Afterlife: “They believed that heaven included a big feast in a hall with lots of drinking, a massive amount of food,” he said. “Then, afterwards—after the feast— they’d slaughter all their friends. Those who survived would get up and do it all over again the next day. This was their idea of Paradise, unending feasting and killing. That’s what waited for them on the other side.”

I imagined the Vikings, complete with helmets and armor, celebrating the carnage – both the meat they ate and the men they’d killed.  Håkon went on to say, however, that only the Vikings who had died in battle were meant to enjoy such heavenly pleasures. (No mention of what the women had to look forward to.) Apparently it was shameful for a warrior to expire in bed—of illness or even quietly at sleep. No wonder they fought with such enthusiasm in real life!

“It’s – how do you say it in English?—a paradox,” Håkon went on, “that Norway claims these bloodthirsty Vikings as our national emblem, when we as a country are peaceful people. I think there is something perverse about celebrating the Vikings as our heroes.”   I told him that the U.S. –and most of the world, really—perceives Norway as the peace-brokers of the planet.  It is indeed a paradox that such a country has its origins in rape and pillage. One placard said that the Viking warriors often claimed whole towns and slaughtered monasteries as well as women and children.

To hold up the contemporary Norwegian next to the marauding Viking is like –yes—comparing apples to oranges. Today each Norwegian is cared for physically and economically by the state (Norway’s state-owned oil supplies has rendered it one of the world’s richest nations) and the people are particularly mindful of preserving the land and resources for future generations. There’s even a Seed Vault tucked away in the northern mountains near  Longyearbyen.  It’s rather difficult to see a marauding Viking in the intelligent, fit, and mindful Norwegian of today. Holding up one beside the other, however, reveals not only the contrast, but something else as well.

Today my husband Ole, a bowmaker, and I had lunch with his friend and colleague Jacob, a violin-maker in Oslo. We discussed the current news, the trial of the man who gunned down over a hundred teenagers at a Norwegian youth camp not quite a year ago, killing 69 and injuring over 100. The man had also ignited a car bomb outside government offices, killing eight people and injuring over 200.  An unspeakable tragedy, it has also been a terrible stain on the country’s self-image. Shortly after the bloodbath, when it was clear that a Norwegian and not an outsider had committed the carnage, the country could barely accept it. The Prime Minister said it had turned a “paradise into hell.”

Sometimes we cannot reconcile such brutal contradictions, especially in a society that prides itself in being “civilized.”  But by holding both the peace and pandemonium in the palm of our hand, we can actually come closer to accepting the incongruities in our own lives, each with its ragged edges. And maybe for Norway –to hold that terrible truth up to the light – it (and we) can appreciate even more the incredible bounty and beauty and concord this country has carved – like a maker shaping his violin out of a felled tree. Not either/or but both, and…

For each of us is both the elegant violin scroll as well as that ship’s serpent masthead – going for the melody as well as the mayhem. When we can accept this, perhaps we can praise more loudly, love more deeply, and be more attentive to the moving tides that swell in all of us.

 

 

Poems and Ponderings

Native Tongue: Thoughts on Language

NATIVE TONGUE

Language is a “way to see,” my husband Ole says. He speaks two languages well and a couple passably. He slips into a new skin, though, when he speaks his first language, Norwegian. To hear those melodic cadences fall off his tongue is to witness a different man.

Yesterday his uncle Per Johan skippered us through a little archipelago in Orrnerfijorden, and as we floated by the charming cottages tucked into birch trees along the promontories, the men chatted about the history of the place and how his uncle had first sailed these waters when he was five weeks old. Or so Ole told me.  I wouldn’t know. The words are only sounds to me, although the crescendos and swells reveal what Robert Frost always called “The Sound of Sense.” There is a drama to listening to any language, and the rise of  vowel sounds which comes to a punctuated full stop is familiar to anyone who speaks. The pause of comprehension, then the response – the laugh, or the “ohhh.”

My husband’s first language gave him a passport to others. Would that I could slip into a new skin, the Northern wasters of Norsk and taste the goat cheese with a different name, potent and rich as gjeitost.  Just saying it helps me to see the smooth brown block, sliced off thinly and placed on a piece of buttered bread. “Yay Tost” I say. And I say it again. Gjeitost. Gjeitost. ..

Poems and Ponderings

Thoughts recorded on a Hike in Stavern, Norway June 4th, 2012

When we travel we always seem to think about what others have seen or said about a place. The picture postcards of the past or the blogs of now. It’s difficult not to impose our expectations or historical presuppositions on experience.  And yet travel, too, is just the everyday:  A good pillow; a stomach ache or a hankering for a glass of wine before dinner. Questions as tiny as ‘When will the next coffee be?’ And ‘How long will it take to get to Stavern?’  Sometimes it’s best to resist squishing a place into what we think it should be and just let it be what it is: Board-and-batten red houses like my own studio, the Poet Station; two longtime friends speaking Norwegian on a bench near a harbor; your husband’s face, tired and handsome on a train going south.

Poems and Ponderings

In the Poet’s House

Click image to hear what the Wright Brothers are dreaming about…

Poems and Ponderings